Blackbox Thinking by Matthew Syed
‘Blackbox Thinking by Matthew Syed’ is no ordinary ‘self-help’ book. The book outlays a set of key concepts that shaped my thinking, which I am utterly grateful to the author.
The author outlines 6 key principles from 6 Parts of the book, but among them following are my favourites:
Cognitive Dissonance:
Syed quotes to the book, “When Prophecy Fails” , in this he describes how one lady forms a group of ‘true believers’, and she lays down a prophecy stating on a particular day, the world is going to be destroyed, and the only true believers are going to survive, by some outer space ship. They get ready to be escorted, by following certain rituals and wait until the spaceship arrives, on the said particular day. (Press, particularly was interested in this)
But nothing happened.
The remarkable part of this story is how they reshaped their thinking/belief after the catastrophic failure of the prophecy. The believers told the others that since they became the true believers, God did not destroy the world, and saved the planet!, without accepting their failure. This is explained as cognitive dissonance.
How often do you meet people in your day-to-day life, stuck in cognitive dissonance?
The Nozzle Paradox:
Unilever had an efficiency problem with a nozzle which produced washing powders, where the pressure drops significantly at one end, which was a problem for their production efficiency.
So as any prudent person would do, they called subject matter experts, the mathematicians specialized in physics behind high-pressure fluid dynamics and other aspects of chemical analysis, the so-called ‘intelligent designers’. These are the so-called people we call to solve a problem, with the right skills and the right training to solve the problem.
But it didn’t work. Was little improved but didn’t succeed.
Then Unilever turned into their team of biologists, they had a little understanding of fluid dynamics, but they had a profound understanding of the relationship between failure and success.
Their theory was ‘simple’. They took ten copies of the nozzles and applied a small change to each. and then subjected them to failure by testing them. Some of them were long, short, had bigger and smaller holes etc. After evaluating they realized one of them was slightly better than the original. They selected that, ‘the winner’.
And then they base-lining the winner made a slight change to each part and evaluated. After 45 generations and 449 ‘failures,’ they found the one with ‘success threshold’ they were expecting. (On the other note, they were biologists, they were good with concepts such as evolution/natural selection)
Sometimes your experts may fail, but a different opinion can help.
